The Nocturnal Instability
by tensorial
Summary: Night awakes the monsters who live inside one's head, or how I imagine the show could deal with the insecurities lurking in these characters if it were a deeper and darker show. T for overall darkness.    My first fanfiction, back in July 2009.
1. Chapter 1

Nights are always hard.

The day awakes (never before 11 a.m.) and she is Penny. Penny the fun girl; Penny the blonde; the somewhat ditzy wannabe-actress; Penny the happy, well-integrated in society, knowledgeable about how to deal with people, _normal_ woman. She is not like those weirdos on the other side of the corridor. She. Is. Normal. And mostly happy.

Day is good. Daylight shuts up The Voice inside her head. She works, smiles, serves tables, goes to yet another audition, unsuccessful again, but as long as the sun is still up in the sky she is still sunny Penny, smiley Penny, Penny Blossoms' Penny.

But the sun always ends up disappearing, and night comes. And she starts racing against The Voice, shutting her up with gaming, with dances in much too noisy dance floors, with alcohol, with yet another hook-up, yet another guy who will disrespect her.

"_You know you don't deserve respect."_

Damn, The Voice had caught up with her again.

"_What, so you thought you could outrun Me? You know you cannot outrun Me, you puny insect... I AM YOU. And we know you don't deserve anything."_

No, The Voice will not hurt her tonight, she must run, she must find a way not to listen, she will not be Penny anymore, she will be Queen Penelope on Age of Conan, and The Voice will not follow her online. She will stay awake until the sun comes up again, and The Voice will be weakened and leave her alone for a few hours.

"_You know that won't work, Penny. You know I AM HERE. I am ALWAYS here. And I saw that you failed again today. Of course, I knew you would fail. You ARE failure. You aren't just A failure, you ARE failure. Everybody knows you ARE failure, the-one-who-will-never-matter. You will never be something great. And everybody knows that."_

No! No! She was Queen Penelope, she was a fighter, she wouldn't listen to that without a fight! The Voice was wrong, she needed to tell The Voice just how wrong all that was.

"Queen Penelope, AFK."

The apartment was a mess, as always. But the letter was easy to find, inside her night-table's drawer, just besides a half-opened box of condoms and a Hello Kitty diary that smelled of strawberries. She opened the letter.

"_Oh, don't be ridiculous... Come on! Mrs. Holden's letter? Is that the best you can do, really?"_

The letter had been opened and read many times. Penny missed Mrs. Holden, the elderly lady next door back home, who had been their informal babysitter when she and her siblings were little. She remembered afternoons and evenings spent there, helping with the baking and not wanting to do her homework. Her sister was the smart one, as their father never failed to tell her.

_You know he was right, Penny. You are dumb, stupid, a stupid blonde. Everybody knows."_

Mrs. Holden had become somewhat of a confidant during Penny's teen years. And when Penny started crying in her old, well-known kitchen, the old lady reached for a biscuit tin where she kept her secret savings and told her to follow her dream, to leave the community college where she was unhappy and try to chase her dream. Penny wished Mrs. Holden hadn't died a few months afterwards; she was the only one who could shut The Voice up.

"_You are ridiculous, Penny. You are a poor excuse for a human being. Holding onto that letter of a deluded old woman who clearly had no idea when she wrote that you were talented and that she believed you were destined to great things! For God's sake, Penny, you know that you're not even a _'sweet and lovely girl'_ as the poor deluded woman wrote. You're just an impostor. You're dumb, lazy and immoral, you deserve no respect and no love, and you have no friends because you aren't worthy."_

The alarm clock flashes 3:30 AM and Queen Penelope puts the laptop aside, grabs her knees and tries to drown The Voice in a glass of vodka.

Sunrise is still far away.


	2. Chapter 2

_**night **_

_noun_

_1 the period of darkness in each twenty-four hours; the time from sunset to sunrise _

...

Night and day are just part of a routine, and routine is good.

The day awakes (never after 6:30 a.m.) and he is Dr. Sheldon Cooper, PhD. IQ of 187, genius child, never silly, always rational, careful with germs and anything that can endanger his intelligence, his life and his routines. He has a system, and he is not like everybody else. He is _Homo Novus_. The next step in evolution.

Routine is good. Routine dispels ghosts and monsters. Routine lets him be Dr. Sheldon Cooper, PhD, with his life planned to the minute. Careful routines avoid germs, which means he will prevent diseases and stays at the hospital (how awful it was to feel vulnerable!). And routines prevent surprises, so no more beatings at the hands of bullies to end up, once again, at the hospital. Routine is predictable, safe. A = B means non-B = non-A. Predictable, safe, soothing. Surprises are bad, change is bad. Change is illogical, like feelings. And feelings are bad and unsafe.

After the day comes the night, and then the day again. Routine. His predictable meals for each day of the week, his bedroom where nobody else can be. Routine is safe, and safe is good. Like rules, and strikes, and his spot on the couch. And going to bed early.

He doesn't admit it, even to himself, but routines mean nothing bad will happen, and going to bed early keeps the monster away.

...

_**Cultural aspects**_

_Night is often associated with danger and evil, because bandits and dangerous animals can be concealed by darkness. [...] In almost all cultures, there exist stories and legends warning of the dangers of night-time. In fact, the Saxons called the darkness of night the 'death mist'._ (from Wikipedia)

...

The monster doesn't speak, doesn't explain itself, doesn't give him much data to investigate. It comes as a fog, as a dark fluid that envelopes his insides and doesn't respond to logic. He cannot beat the monster. But if he doesn't stray away from his routines, most nights the monster will let him go to sleep.

11:00 PM. Sheldon fills the daily log of social interactions, carefully puts it back inside the drawer, says his nightly prayers, unchanged since he was a child, makes the sign of the cross (thrice), and goes to sleep.

_Let Sheldon be a rigid, undeformable body with a mass of 75 kg, approximately described as a cylinder of homogeneous density with a ray of 0.18 meter and a length of 1.90 meter. Suppose he is running away from a few larger, scary boys at a constant horizontal speed of v_x = 8 m/s._ Why would a grown-up Sheldon be running away from his childhood bullies, instead of the slight kid he was? Morpheus, the greek god of slumber, sure has a strange sense of humour. Asleep, Dr. Sheldon Cooper, PhD, pondered whether this was sarcasm.

_Now, let Sheldon be caught by one of the boys, a big round one with a mass of 90 kg. To simplify calculations, let the boy be a punctual mass that grabs Sheldon right in his center of mass._ Very adequate that the bully would be a punctual mass while he mantained all his dimensions, even in a freshman's level Physics problem. Sheldon almost smiled in his sleep.

_Suppose further that Sheldon falls as a rigid undeformable bar, from the initial vertical, to the ground. Write the equations of motion and make an educated guess on what will be the pressure experienced by his hands, assuming a perfectly inelastic collision._ Dr. Sheldon Cooper, PhD, is asleep and Newtonian dynamics calculations, even as trivial as those, are harder to do in your dreams. Without his friendly equations to help him, Sheldon falls once more to be beaten up. Pain, physical pain, but also humiliation. The bullies morph into something he cannot see, a dark shade with scary eyes, sinister and oddly loud-speaking. And the dark monster grabs his throat and starts suffocating him.

The lean, straight form under the blue striped duvet bolts upright.

"Danger! Danger!" He looks around, but nobody else is in the bedroom. Good. People can't be in his bedroom. In a slightly less high-pitched voice, he concludes: "Certainly I've experienced a nightmare. The increased pulse rate and faster breathing show I am going through full fight-or-flight response, a specific set of reactions in the autonomic nervous system, activated by a sudden release of adrenalin and noradrenalin."

He checks his watch. 4:32 AM. He gets up, washes his hands and warms some milk. 4:37 AM. Dr. Sheldon Cooper, PhD, pours the correct quantities of milk and chocolate powder into a cup, mixes carefully with a small spoon, and sits on the safe spot of the couch. The monster will not get him tonight.

4:37 AM. The milk is perfect, but something's wrong. 4:37 AM. It's not cold, but he feels himself shiver. 4:37 AM. Maybe he's finally going insane. 4:37 AM. Why does he feel oddly compelled to do such an illogical thing? 4:37 AM. He goes to the door, gets the keys from the bowl, both sets of them, and stands by the door, strangely undecided, listening to the sounds of the night.

A crash sound, followed by a whimpering.

It's precisely 4:38 AM when Dr. Sheldon Cooper, PhD, knocks at the door of 4B.


	3. Chapter 3

**knock knock knock**

"Penny"

His voice urgent, his right hand repeating the ritual while the left one fumbles with her keys.

**knock knock knock**

"Penny!"

The key turns in the lock, while his mind goes through countless terrible scenarios. He must knock a third time, or something bad will happen to her and he could never forgive himself for being so careless.

**knockknockknock**, frantic, as he opens the door:

"Penny—Dear Lord Almighty!"

His brain quickly gathers data: Penny weirdly sprawled on the floor, near the door, where dangerously slippery clothes were abandoned, scattered. An almost empty bottle of vodka, a strong smell of ethanol, pieces of a broken glass on the floor, her arm bleeding and touching the floor. An open wound, exposed to who knows how many pathogenic agents. He shudders.

"Shel-don?"

She sounds unfocused, just like her gaze. Her face and her eyes are red and puffy, and Sheldon suspects she was crying long before falling and hurting her arm.

"Penny, we must wash and disinfect your arm. An open wound in such an unsanitary environment..."

He can't finish because, clearly, she is far too inebriated to retain a smidgen of common sense. Penny reaches for the bottle to pour the remainder of the vodka over the bloody arm, but fortunately his reflexes are good enough and he manages to grab her arms while avoiding the pieces of glass and items of clothing spread on the floor.

"Come on, Penny, I have proper antiseptics and sterile dressings in my apartment."

He inelegantly wraps his arms around her and lifts Penny up, despite the revulsion he feels for the smell of vodka and fresh blood, and ponders that, despite appearances, it is good that Leonard spent the night at Leslie Winkle's, for he would be less than useless vomiting his guts here.

"Let me... go! I don't ca...re if I get sick or bl...eed to death." Penny isn't just tipsy, she is actively fighting against his help. He promises himself once again he will never, ever get drunk.

"Penny! You're clearly in no condition to make decisions, alcohol has impaired your judgment to such a point that you disregard the preservation of your own life!" He suddenly sounds scared: "Have you hit your head?"

"No. Just... Who ca...res if I live?" The Voice has won. Penny slumps towards the floor, and the tall physicist must gather all his upper-body strength to keep her somewhat upright.

"I care, Penny, and** you will do what I say**." His voice is lower than usual, strong and commanding, like when they were making Penny Blossoms and the boys were getting discontented.

The rest of the night is a blur. They go to his apartment. He washes her face and her wound, disinfects and dresses the arm. Fortunately, it doesn't need stitches. He holds her head over the sink when she vomits and washes her face again. He helps her unsteady steps and lets her sit on his spot of the couch "if you promise you'll stay there and drink the tea I'm making, Penny". He scrubs the sink and his arms while the water reaches boiling temperature. He washes his own face and scrubs his arms a second time. He lets the tea cool down just enough and brings her a cup. He is standing beside her, in his usual rigid, unrelaxed way, when she starts crying and the cup of tea, almost empty in her hands, starts trembling. He reaches for her hands and the cup. It reminds him of the napkin and Leonard Nimoy and he finds himself sitting beside his spot on the couch, beside Penny, hugging her. Uncomfortable, stiff, he surrounds her with one arm and with the other puts the cup away, on the table, while Penny sobs incoherent words into his chest.

"Voice... head... failure... impostor... worthless... Sorry... wrong... Thanks... sorry..."

"There, there."

Penny falls asleep and he doesn't move, even though he wanted to go back to his bedroom, for if he leaves her alone now the monster will try to suffocate her again. His routines will have to wait.

He loses notion of time. She wakes up, looking calmer, but exhausted. He realizes she won't be strong enough to beat the monster, not on her own. He will find help.

"Penny, you don't have to live like this. I am here for you."

Oddly, she believes Dr. Wackadoodle.

It's precisely 7:18 AM. Outside, the sun is rising.


End file.
